[Inquisitor]

Bugtrackers are nice, if you have a license to use it, might be worth considering.

Probably be the first thing to deal with

[_argv[-1]]

Originally posted by Kazan
netscape comes with the Sun JRE

Unless it's Netscape 6 (I don't know what JRE that comes with, if any), the JRE it comes with is indeed Sun's, but it's incredibly old (JRE 1.0.x I believe).

[mikhael]

Originally posted by Kazan

then you shouldn't be using Bezerkly Systems Distribution
 

First, that's "Berzerkeley", and its a hackish reconstruction of Berkeley Software Distribution. What do they teach you lot in school these days?

Kazan, Unix administration is what I do for a living, day in and day out, for the last 10yrs. I've adminned HP-UX, Solaris/SunOS, Ultrix, BSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, BSDi, Redhat, Mandrake, Slackware, and Debian. Hell, I spent some time running Minix and VMS systems in the Navy. In that time, I've had the "pleasure" of administering Microsoft networks of various flavors, Banyan Vines networks and Novell networks. I've played with one or two [N]OSs in my day. Just one or two.

In my experience between in ISP/Webhosting companies, the Navy, and educational jobs, I've discovered something: Linux is not stable, nor secure. Of course, I should clarify that: the distributions of Linux I've seen used in server room environements are not stable, nor secure. This includes, but is not limited to: Redhat, Debian, Slackware and (of all things) Mandrake. That's not a representative sample, of course, since there's only slightly fewer distros than there are Linux users. Its not that they're bad, its just that they are not good primetime systems--IN MY OPINION. Linux is certainly very good for making sure that you'll have support for every random and obscure piece of hardware on the planet. It is certainly great for being on the cutting edge. I'm not a cutting edge kind of administrator.

I'm a sleep at night and late into the morning administrator. I'm a go on vacation and not worry about the mobile going off sort of administrator. I like predictable things. I like things with a minimum of security issues. The fewer hours I spend trying to fix things, the more money per hour I earn (I'm on salary). If I can keep my hours down to 25-30 per week, I'm doing good. I run BSD systems for that reason, particularly OpenBSD. One would think, given my old SystemV roots, I would abhor the setup of a BSD derivative system. Quite the contrary, I find it sane, stable, and simple to manage. I can consistently get higher uptime out of a FreeBSD system than out of an (as far as humanly possible) identical Linux system. That's just MY experience.

I'm not bashing Linux (I dislike current linux distros on the basis of fact and experience, not some advocacy/zealotry thing). If there was a Linux distro that met my needs better than *BSD, my new servers would be built on that distro, and I'd migrate the BSD systems. The less work I do, the more I earn per hour. Its that simple.

I'd rather run a Linux box than a Windows box for most serious work. I'd rather run a BSD box than either Linux or Windows.

[mikhael]

Originally posted by penguin

Yeah, a co-worker has messed around with it.  Looks nice, but I'm kinda a minimalist, so I am just running Enlightenment 0.16.3, with no Gnome or anything.  I can do what I need to, which is have about 12 ssh sessions open, Emacs, and MiniTik.  The closest I come to using any GUI type applications is grkrellm.  I do occassionally use Netscape (like now, I'm at home), but sadly, I do most of the web browsing from my Win2K box using MSIE (our "corporate standard" -- can't even access our private intranet using Netscape )

E and Emacs? Masochism of the finest calibre.

I'm kind of old school. I try to keep to multiple vttys, or if I have to bring up Xfree, I use olvwm. I don't run of the integrated desktop environments. I'm not very interested in replicating Windows on my *nix box. I DO have KDE2 installed, and will install KDE3 when there's a reasonably stable FreeBSD port. When developing stuff for my Zaurus, I can do most everything on a full *nix system, only crosscompiling to ARM for final, live testing.

(See? I use Linux. Embedix is the most stable distro I've ever used, but not QUITE suitable for server installs. )

[penguin]

Originally posted by mikhael

I can consistently get higher uptime out of a FreeBSD system than out of an (as far as humanly possible) identical Linux system. That's just MY experience.

We have a fleet of about 200 servers in production, plus several test servers, development servers, etc.  They are running a mix of FreeBSD and RedHat Linux, although we are in the process of phasing out FreeBSD.

Anyhow, we needed to make a kernel mod to one of the old FreeBSD boxes. Before we took it down, I ran 'uptime' -- this FreeBSD box had been running over two years, longer than I had been at the company.  We were almost too awestruck to reboot it....

But we see pretty good reliability on the Linux boxes too, and these are machines that are delivering an aggregate total of over 300M HTTP requests per day.


Damn, we do get off-topic on these OS wars

[mikhael]

Originally posted by penguin
We have a fleet of about 200 servers in production, plus several test servers, development servers, etc.  They are running a mix of FreeBSD and RedHat Linux, although we are in the process of phasing out FreeBSD.

Out of curiosity, why the BSD instead of the RedHat? Looking for a more homogenous network? Or was the corporate support the issue? I know BSDi, who was doing the corporate suport for FreeBSD got bought by someone else (Wind River?) and the support just went straight through the floor.

Anyhow, we needed to make a kernel mod to one of the old FreeBSD boxes. Before we took it down, I ran 'uptime' -- this FreeBSD box had been running over two years, longer than I had been at the company.  We were almost too awestruck to reboot it....
[/B]

I think I'd weep if I had to cycle a box with an uptime older than my contract. That's excellent though.

[penguin]

We have 2d graphics and mouse support!

I would post a screenshot, except that I am at work, and I'm still running XFree86 3.3.5 (don't get started on that ) and SDL doesn't seem to like it -- some required XF86 extensions are apparently not present.  Anyhow, I'll put one or two up tonight.

Current issues:

• The performance is poor, but this may be my implementation -- some of the timing stuff is outta whack, and sleeping for X seconds instead of X milliseconds.  The 15 fps ani's run at about one frame every 2 secs -- not good.
• There are some odd artifacts that appear from time to time, but I haven't turned all the clipping code on yet.
• Some stuff (not all) that's supposed to be drawn relative to a popup window (e.g., the graphics in the mission brief; the input box in the "choose pilot" opening screen) are drawn relative to the base window (ie in the top-left corner)

So you can sign in, see the (v..e..r..y  s..l..o..w) command briefing, get the mission briefing and use the ship/weapons loadout screens.  It croaks when you enter the game, but I haven't done any 3d yet, so that's expected.

Ani's don't seem to be working in the main hall, neither the background ones (crane, flyby, elevator pilot) nor the mouseover ones (ready room doors, etc.)  It could just be that they're really slow, or they may be disabled or broken...

Also, attempting to reopen a player file segfaults, but I think I know what's wrong there -- in the meantime,  I erase data/players/single/* before starting.  This same problem also causes a segfault when you go to the Barracks screen.

Still no sound, no joystick, no multi.  Lower priorities on those, and that's probably the order I'll implements them.

[Mysterial]

Originally posted by penguin

Dunno what kind of services Warpcore offers besides CVS, but SF does have a lot of neat other stuff -- bug trackers, mailing lists, forums (OK, we don't need that ), etc., so I think it should remain under consideration.

I'd rather use SF, but unfortunately the only license I know that SF allows which even comes close to being appropraite to FS2 is the Aladdin license. (Of course, I'm not acquainted with every single license SF allows. But of those I know, only the Aladdin license allows unsellable code)